love. recovery. bad advice.

Dear Cassie

Here’s my first response to your “Dear Slushkitty/Alkie” questions! More to follow…, so stay tuned!

From Cassie:

Should I have yogurt + granola or apples + peanut butter for dinner tonight? Also, what do I want to do with my life? Because I have no idea.

Dear Cassie,

I trust you have eaten since you asked this question. Sorry it took me so long to respond – this place expects me to work sometimes, which is complete bullshit. Anyway, thank you for your question! Apples and peanut butter. Definitely. And it’s funny you should ask this! I actually have some noteworthy feelings about peanuts! You’re probably too young to remember the world before everyone was all irrational and alarmist about nuts and nut dust (heh heh, nut dust). Presently, I don’t know ANYONE who has ever even once been killed by Darth Peanut and his nut dust. (I imagine Darth Peanut looks like Darth Vader dressed up in a top hat and monocle). Anyway, bee sting allergies I totally understand because you can’t really do anything about that. No one deliberately eats bees, not one with a bee sting allergy anyway. I know people who have bee sting allergies and have survived childhood and many a summer outdoors by doing two simple things – wearing a bracelet and telling the camp counselor. There were never any dramatic warnings of impending doom, certain death. Now we apparently live in a toxic invisible cloud of nut dust that didn’t exist in the later decades of the 20th century. I worked with one of those nut cases (sorry – couldn’t resist) with the Fear of the Nut and she had to let evvvvvvverybody know, like it made her exotic or interesting or something. Seriously! She was actually my boss, let’s call her “C U Next Tuesday”, and she is pretty lucky she fired me when she did. She was one of th… sigh… I am already getting bored thinking about her. I could complain about her for weeks – I actually have complained about her for weeks to anyone who’d listen and I haven’t even worked there in six years! A pretty common theme amongst the kind people in AA is that, pre-sobriety, every boss they ever had was an asshole. My experience was no different. C.U.N.T. was a total asshole. She truly was. C.U.N.T. made fun of the way I dressed – she used to sing circus music when I walked by – yeah, ha ha clever, funny unless you’re me – and she pounded her fists in rage on my desk on more than one occasion. Grown woman! God, that was a miserable place! But moving along… at least for as long as I have been back in Boston, which is seven years, all my bosses have been colossal assholes, but my present boss’s assholeness has been shrinking! Why, just the other day, I was so excited to tell Nelissa of a professional breakthrough! My boss came into my office all pissed off because I didn’t do something he was waiting for me to do, and when he whined that sniveling whine, instead of blushing or jumping out of my skin or crying or getting all defensive or making excuses (lying) or feeling overwhelmed with the chronic fear of losing my livelihood, I just told him I didn’t do it, that I’d do it right away – I didn’t even give him a reason or an apology! He was fine with that and just left and carried on in his sniveling way, and I just resumed writing my blog and ignoring his emails. Such progress I am making!!! Really, it was so encouraging to realize a few minutes after that happened that I had experienced and reacted appropriately to what the situation actually was – a minor, and pretty inconsequential bump in his (low) expectation of me. It was an uncompleted task, not the end of my life as I knew it because I was going to get justifiably fired because I am a huge, brainless, incompetent failure (yes, I know, I should be working, not dicking around, but even if I was working, I’d have had the same reaction. I’ve only started being brazenly apathetic in the past 4 years). Yay! The weight of the world is slowly being lifted off my shoulders! It’s marvelous, as in, I MARVEL!!!, when I notice that life is so much less complicated and serious and stressful than it has always been simply because I am sober. It’s fun to recognize it! It’s like a Scoobie Snack for my soul, and I know there are more in Shaggy’s pocket. Now, back to peanuts! There was a lot of downtime when I worked for C.U.N.T. so, naturally, I would spend this time plotting her death. Anaphylactic Shock had a nice ring to it. She was an annoying coffee-drinker, very dramatic, had to let evvvvvvverybody know how she can’t function without her coffee blah blah, “Gotta go to Bucky’s! It soothes the beast!”. So, I figured, since she was gravely allergic to peanuts and annoyingly addicted to coffee, I’d casually offer to make coffee one day and then grind some peanuts in with the coffee beans. Sociopathic, but brilliant! Right? Don’t judge – I didn’t do it. I don’t know how to make coffee. So, sweet Cassie, the short answer is apples and peanut butter, unless you have the Fear of the Nut, and then yogurt and granola. The lesson in this story is: if you decide to make a personality 180, suddenly develop a peanut allergy, and find yourself managing sociopathic alcoholics for a living, you might want to keep that nut secret to yourself.

As far as what you want to do with your life? Easy! You are as gorgeous as you are brilliant, and it’s about time you get recognized for both. So I think it’d be purrfect if you could invent a machine or a procedure that would safely and conveniently allow you to remove your brain from your skull. You can then take out your brain, dress it up in a sexy swimsuit, and start making your millions as a supermodel!

Love,

Slushkitty

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8 responses

When people are texting while walking towards me on my side of the sidewalk, I often think about how it would be fun to smash them in the face with a cast iron frying pan. I wouldn’t actually do it, but I often think about it. I think that this is what the phychologists would call sociopathic behavior. Am I nuts or do these goddamn people need to watch where they are going?

Also, the way the kids wear their pants these days is a little annoying…but an even bigger issue is that it seems so uncomfortable for them..they are having to constantly hike up their pants. I guess this isn’t really a question, is it? (now it is!)

Cassie, we NEVER NEVER stop knowing what we want to do with our lives. It’s a never ending journey, one which I have learned through many agonizing months of despair can be exciting and challenging, instead of looming and despondent. Once I got over the fear and replaced it with FAITH in something bigger than me ( a power otherwise known as possibility), it was easier to crawl out from the crushing rules of what I have to do and begin to believe in what i might be able to do!